I worked for Dollar General for exactly 1 year.in that year I was taken advantage of any which way but loose.
I went to a career fair looking for a job in retail, and was hired on due to my previous managerial experiences with Walgreens. I was trained at a store in Florissant for a week or two before I was placed in my store in Overland.
My training consisted of running a register, stocking freight, cleaning, a tiny bit of merchandising, and counting down the registers at night. When going through training, my thoughts were that I was doing grunt work that the manager didn't want to do. I thought my duties would be more managing of employees, coaching and teaching store personnel on the above duties, administration, driving sales, and controlling inventory. I was wrong, it was all the duties of a Walgreens clerk, but being blamed for anything wrong in the store too.
Dollar General is a top-down ran company. If you are not a District Manager or above. Your opinion or wants do not matter. They pay you for 40 hours but expect 80 hours of work a week. The normal crew size at DG is 4-6 employees total to run a business that does 500,000 dollars worth of sales. It's a dollar based sale, so you are talking several million items leaving a store per year, and the stocking involved.
The stocking and conditioning takes the employees and the "manager" 40 hours a week to get done. I was getting freight shipments of over a 1000 pcs. And expected to have all of the freight stocked, and store squared away in 24 hours. I worked at Walgreen stores with three time the amount of help, and only then was that possible. Dollar General has a scheduling matrix that they enforce. It normally allows for only 1-2 employees in a store at anyone time. Your lucky to have 6 hours of time to put freight away per day. It is a demoralizing task.
In addition to the above I was in an urban store with no camera suveillance or security guard. Merchandise literally ran out of the store.in the year that I was there, an inventory audit occurred. The store lost an equivlent of 2 and a half tracker trailer loads worth of merchandise. Average load was 35,000 dollars. That's 2 and a half managers worth of merchandise. That audit, thankfully, ended my career with DG.
It's sad that they lose that much inventory, and know hiring more people would limit the loss. They have the balls to blame managers, who "live" in a store a minimum of 45 hours a week, 6 days per week. The actual time is usually 80 hours, 7 days a week.
It's total horseS*t. It's a farmhand mentality. It's a business with the resources to be really great, but chose to live in the past.
My advice is don't work there unless working for meager wages is your idea of a satisfying life.
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